Shared Component Library Improves Consistency and Velocity
Sean McQuay
Jan 25,
2021 |
Posted in
Digital Experience
The Brief
A large financial institution was struggling to maintain consistency among applications. Designers were creating multiple variants of similar components, causing duplicated efforts for developers. Feature implementation was slower than expected due to the design and development of these subtle variants.
The Challenge
Developers had no mechanism to share components among code bases and were left copying and pasting or rewriting for each project. Even when implementing new features, liberties were taken during the development phase in interpretation of the design styling. As this was a large code base, many designers found themselves confined to certain aspects or features with limited exposure to the designs of their peers. This model led to many design variants or modifications of preexisting components. Ultimately, these mechanisms led to slow feature implementation and difficulty in maintaining brand consistency.
The Solution
It was determined that a globally-accessible component library leveraged across platforms and teams would provide a near-immediate resolution.
Apexon helped implement a shared component library of readily-consumable React components, hosted through Styleguidist. This component library provided developers the ability to import it into various projects as an NPM module adhering to semantic versioning. Additionally, design system rules were coded such that developers did not need to write CSS within their applications, which ultimately improved consistency.
The Solution
As a result of implementing this library, new component creation was reduced, as designers could quickly reference a live instance of the component library as well as back import it into the design tools of choice.
Developers spent significantly less time on component creation or enhancements and could instead focus on quickly implementing new features and resolving bugs. Sprint velocity presented a meaningful increase while application consistency and performance improved.
Partnership Platforms/Software
